


How to Beat a Heat Wave

by alemara



Category: Burn Notice, Milliways, Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-19
Updated: 2012-06-19
Packaged: 2017-11-08 01:53:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alemara/pseuds/alemara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what happens when I promise strip-chicken, guns, naked, and smut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Beat a Heat Wave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anemptymargin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anemptymargin/gifts).



Michael starts it.

That’s her story and she’s sticking to it, but the fact of the matter is that her response to the heat of the day was to pull open the door to the tiny balcony, letting in the tepid Miami breeze, and  _his_ was to tug his sweat-stained t-shirt off over his head and toss it in the general direction of the laundry pile, earning himself a look just this side of a glare from where she’s poring over papers on the counter.  He catches it out of the corner of an eye, turns to look at her, just as her eyes slide back to the notes.

“What?”

She shakes her head, eyebrows lifting.  Notes.  Papers.  There’s work to do.  “Nothing.”

“You gave me a look.”

“I’m giving these  _papers_ a look.  Like you asked.  Remember?”

She’s still not looking up, but she hears his bare feet padding on the floor, feels the countertop shift as he leans his weight on both palms against the wood.  Something tightens in her stomach.  Possibly they should have avoided the oysters at the restaurant last night.  “There was definitely a look,” he points out, which is his mistake, because she can hear the smugness in his voice and knows it’ll be there, sparkling in his eyes and making his smile wide and self-satisfied, showing what always seems like every single one of his stupid perfect teeth.

Stubbornness sets in.  She gives him the barest of glances, a bored flick of hazel eyes and arched brows.  It’s the glance equivalent of brushing away a fly.

“Could you put a shirt on, please?”

He stares at her.  “It’s a hundred degrees in here.  Be happy I’m wearing pants.”

It’s true that the heat is partially to blame.  It settles over the loft like a sleeping cat curling there, muffling everything.  Even the sounds floating through the window seem tired, their usually brilliant edges dulled.  Miami is deep in the sinking center of a heat wave.  There’s a sense of weary trepidation, all its aggressive life beaten, for the time being, into submission, driven inside to sweat in front of A/C units.

Not that the loft has A/C.

If she dies of heat stroke, she hopes he adds it to the list of things to blame on the guy who burned him.

“It’s a little distracting,” she says, mostly to the counter, but she can  hear the way he frowns at her.  It’s in his tone, a kind of impatient detachment that appears when they’ve got a job to do and he feels like she’s being uncooperative or childish.  It’s rare --  fortunately -- that he actually lands on outright patronization, but there are times when she thinks that it really wouldn’t hurt for him to be  _wrong_ , once in a while.

“Just focus, all right?  It’ll cool off once the sun goes down.”

“ _You_ focus,” she mutters, petulant, but he’s wandered off and the papers don’t respond.

 

He’s coming down the metal stairs from the loft, and she can pinpoint the second he sees her by the way his steps go from rapid to stuttering to stopped.

“Uh, what are you doing?”

What she’s doing is skinning the thin white tank she’d been wearing off over her head, pulling her ponytail askew in the process.  The shirt drips to the floor from her loose fingers, slumping into a damp, disappointed puddle of cloth.  Feeling marginally better, she tries blowing bangs out of her face, but they stick to the sweat on her forehead and cheek, and when she pushes them back instead, she has to wipe her palm off on her jeans.  “It’s hot,” she reminds him, walking past to try and force one of the window squares open a little further.  A little breeze hits the sweat-shiny slope of her chest, and she closes her eyes to savor the feeling before it, too, evaporates as best it can into the heavy air.  “God, can’t you invest in another fan?  You live in Miami, for Chrissake.  They cost, like, ten bucks.”

He toes the discarded tank top, gives her a wry look.  “It’s not that bad.”

“I would be cooler if I set myself on fire.  Don’t make that a viable option.”

The look he gives her is warning.  “Emma...”

It could mean anything.  It could mean  _don’t start_ , or it could mean  _I’m sorry you’re miserable_ , or it could mean  _I’m sorry you’re miserable, but the heat is not my fault, so don’t start_.

Or any number of things.  She holds up a hand.  “Fine.  But if you're not wearing a shirt, I don't have to, either."

His mouth tightens, and he eyes her, wary, but all he does in the end is shrug and turn away

 

If anything, the heat grows worse as the afternoon stretches, long and lazy, clinging in the air.  Outside, it’s merely horrible.  Inside, it’s suffocating.  Hair sticks to the back of her neck; her skin feels clammy and cool to the touch, despite the pink flush that’s steadily flooding over belly, chest, throat, cheeks.  She wishes she’d brought something other than jeans to wear, wishes even the black lace of her bra didn’t feel like a straightjacket.  Oppressive, baking air rolls in, filling the room with the scent of hot metal and asphalt.  It isn’t so much  _hot_ as it is like Miami is actively trying to smother its entire population, which is a level of maliciousness beyond even what she’s got the city pegged for.

And yet, somehow, Michael manages to maintain the perfect posture with which he usually carries himself despite the fact that everything around him, herself included, is wilting like some sort of Salvador Dali painting.  She’s drooping like a piece of cooked spaghetti, and his back is still ramrod straight, his shoulders perfectly level.  It’s really kind of fascinating and infuriating at the same time.

Living in Maine for the last few months has severely damaged her ability to deal with the sauna that is southern Florida.  Michael, though: the only concession to the heat he seems to be making is the sweat that’s slicking a thin sheen over his skin.  She’s got no idea if it’s due to some remnant of military discipline, acclimation to Miami’s swamp of an atmosphere, or sheer stubbornness, but she’s got to admit it’s impressive.  Even now, sitting on the unmade bed and cleaning the SIG-Sauer nine-mil, his shoulders don’t hunch, his back doesn’t round.  He never really looks relaxed, except when he’s asleep, and then it’s like all the strings winding him so tightly together release all at once and he falls apart into a sprawl of heavy limbs.  He falls asleep like a dog does, with absolute boneless exhaustion and the freaky ability to leap into alert response to any noise or movement in under a second.

How come he can still look thoughtlessly perfect when she feels like a sad dribble of melted ice cream running down the outside of a cone?

Well.  Going back to her original thought -- she’d  told him this was distracting -- she shouldn't say it’s his  _only_ concession, because now he stands up and, before she can say anything, starts unbuckling his belt.  

She’s really going to have to discuss his propensity for wandering around half-naked with him sometime.  It’s a conversation she’s meant to have before, but somehow the topic just never seems to get broached -- mostly because she really doesn’t mind when he decides to hang out shirtless.

The lack of pants, though, that’s kind of a problem.

“Seriously?”

He looks over at her, blue eyes questioning, innocent as a baby despite the fact that he’s unbuttoning the top of his jeans and she can see the elastic of his boxers lying flat against his belly and hips.  Her arms cross, and she feels fresh sweat break out along the line of her neck, tickling as it trickles down to her collarbone.

“What?”

Her eyebrows arch, high.  “You _ just said_ you were at least keeping your pants on.”

Apparently her luck’s run out.  He shrugs, drops the jeans in one smooth motion, belt clattering on the floor.  Her throat feels tight -- damn this heat.  A quick glass of water, excess running over her hand into the sink, helps.  

Minimally, but still.

He must be doing it on purpose, but he’s not watching her for any reaction, isn’t dragging her to the bed to mess that sheet up further, just sits back down after folding up his jeans and tossing them on the floor by the bed.

So, there he is, sitting in boxers and nothing else, so focused on cleaning the nine-mil that she thinks he could probably manage it by mind control alone.  There is nothing about his posture or attitude that suggests this is in any way anything other than totally normal and business-like, which is pretty typical of Michael, really, except for those few moments -- few, and far between -- when the blue of his eyes turns a little less laser-sharp and his smiles are soft instead of brilliant and the dimness of deep night softens all those edges he presents to the world.

She’s making it her damn mission to see those moments more often.  The world  owes him, as far as she’s concerned: he’s had to be tough and hard, unbreakable, his whole life.  He deserves a few more minutes in the day when he can drop the act.   

That could be why, when she gets up off the stool in the kitchen, she reaches for the button on her jeans instead of, say, the refrigerator handle.

The excuse of  _it’s hot_ only takes her so far, really, but w hat’s really great is that he doesn’t even notice until she’s hopping on one foot, trying to tug the fabric from around her ankle.

Okay, she’s knows that’s not actually true.  She’s learned by now that he notices  _everything_ , files it all away somewhere in his miserable file cabinet of a brain until he needs it again; he just chooses to play his observational powers close to the chest, which she can understand, under the circumstances, and she’s willing to play along.  

So he might not look up, but he damn sure  knows what she’s doing, which doesn’t explain why he looks so taken aback by it.

What?  It’s only fair.

Her hair’s in the way, but when she straightens a little, leans to prop herself against the counter with one hand, leather strap loose around her wrist, she sees him looking up, expression unreadable but those goddam eyes of his bluer than ever.

“What?” she asks, like this is a perfectly normal thing to do.  “It’s not like people aren’t walking around outside in bikinis.”

Which is true, but her underwear is patently  not a bikini: for one thing, bikinis don’t generally come in lace.  For another, they’re nowhere near a beach.

His mouth twists, and he gives her that wry, flat look he's perfected, the one that says:  _you’re not being serious, and this is a serious situation_ , which could be true, except for the part where it  _isn’t_.

“For the record,” she says, going to the fridge and pulling out a cup of yogurt, “ _you_ were the one who upped the ante.”

“We’re playing poker, now?” he says, but it’s low and mostly to himself, and she just smiles to the yogurt, dipping a spoon in and licking it clean.

The truth is, they’ve been playing this game of poker since they first met.  They each spend half their time trying to figure the other one out and the other half trying to avoid having to make the first move.  It’s unorthodox, definitely.  Probably pretty messed up.  Archie would probably want to see her weekly for at least six months just to work through the part where they didn’t sleep together until he almost got himself killed.

He’d probably have some choice words about how much Emma enjoys pulling jobs with a guy who is one rusty hinge away from being scarily like one of the nutjobs he hunts down, too.

She can’t explain it, not even when Mary Margaret asks: the best she can say is that Michael gets her, and she gets him, and they’re both the kind of damaged that doesn’t get better, but it doesn’t get worse when they’re together, and that makes her feel sort of...

Good.  Wanted.  

Safe.

For now, though, she thinks the accusing look he gives her is kind of unfair, considering he was the one who started this game of strip-chicken.  The heat must be getting to him, too, because his cheeks are getting a little pink and there’s a kind of feverish disconnect in his eyes before he blinks, pushes the crate towards her with one bare foot.  

 

 

Which is how they end up, him sitting still with that military-stiffness in his back and her sprawled on her stomach across the tangled sheets, cleaning his -- seriously outrageous -- collection of guns in nothing but their underwear, and it actually feels so weirdly normal that it takes her through cleaning and checking the Desert Eagle to realize that there actually isn’t any good reason for them to be doing anything of the kind.

Okay.  It’s hot, sure, but they’ve both handled hundred-degree weather before and been perfectly okay while fully clothed, and these guns don’t need to be cleaned right now; it’s just busy work.

(She might also want to think about the fact that she’s half-naked on a bed with an ex-spy, surrounded by gun parts, and that this bizarre situation has managed to be the best damn part of her week, now that Regina’s managed to find a way to keep her away from Henry, but that thought just sort of slips on by, like water running between her fingers, and she waves it off cheerfully.)

There’s a satisfying  _click_ as she loads the mag back into the nine-mil she’s checking over, hitting the slide switch and sighting along the barrel before putting it down.  It bumps gently along her ribcage as she slides herself forward, folding her arms so she can rest her chin on them and peer down into the crate.  The smell of hot metal and gun oil mixes with sweat and the cotton of the sheets and the scent of some spicy food being cooked across the street, and  _him_ , tha's everywhere in here, this whole damn place smells like him, and she can't get enough of it, even though it also sort of drives her crazy.  She feels itchy and edgy, foot tapping against the mattress, toes tangling in the sheet.  Her fingers want to shake and a faint breeze from the window makes her shiver -- could be the onset of heat stroke.

Maybe she should get some more water.

In contrast, Michael is just as focused as ever, but then, she was always that kid who was fidgeting, who toyed with stuff until it broke just because she couldn’t leave well enough alone, and Michael was always responsible, because he always had to be.  It’s something he can’t seem to let go of, even when Miami is doing its damnedest to smoke him out.  He actually seems to be even more controlled than he was earlier, blue eyes focused on the gun in his hands.  They haven’t flicked to her even once, mostly naked or not, and she’s not totally sure how to take that.

On the one hand, she’s got no reason to think he finds the concept of her in her underwear to be anything but good.  On the other hand, there are times like this, when he’s so busy cleaning a gun he’s cleaned a million times, that it just doesn’t even make an impression.

She’s never had to be responsible for another person in her whole life, until Henry, so she could probably take some lessons, but then, she has the distinct impression that  that works both ways.

There’s a trickle of sweat slowly making its way from his hairline to the hollow of his throat, and she watches it for a long second, caught like a cat watching a fluttering ribbon until she manages to shake herself loose.

This heat is really starting to screw with her.

“You’ve got a lot of guns,” she comments, idly, looking away from that wayward drop of sweat and back to the crate, which doesn’t make her stomach make uncomfortable, startling jumps.  Her jaw presses into her arm as she talks, makes her head bobble.  

His hands pause, and his head lifts, slightly, but he still doesn’t look at her.  “What can I say?  I’m an enthusiast.”

She snorts.  Nobody could ever call her delicate and ladylike, and she thinks she sees the tiniest fold of a smile at the corner of his mouth, but he’s not looking her way, so it’s impossible to say for sure.  “Yeah, that’s one way of putting it.”

“If you’re done,” he says, helpfully, “there’s a Beretta in there that could probably use a good once-over.”

She groans, petulant as a child, and thinks that tucked smile gets a little firmer, but she’s too busy rolling her head back to really tell.  “Really?”

He shrugs.  “It’s gotta get done.  What, would you rather we show up at the bar with a crate full of guns and clean them there?”

He’s got a point, and anyway the afternoon sun is starting slip down towards the far-off water, slanting thick bars of hazy light in through the open door and windows, so with any luck, the temperature should start dropping.

Before it does, though, she’s got one last trick up her sleeve.

He doesn’t move when he feels the mattress shift beneath him, but she can feel him pause, like a full-body hesitation, when he glances down from loading a magazine and sees the loose ends of her bra strap trailing over the edges of the crate.  “Uh,” he says, and leans down, fingers nearly brushing the lace before they curl back into his palm, like the fabric is too hot to touch.

“What?”  If he were looking at her, he’d see how wide and innocent her eyes are, but he’s still not.  “Now we’re even.”

At least he’s not focused on the mag in his hand anymore, she thinks, right before he moves and everything shifts.

The thing about Michael that she always has to keep in mind, even when -- maybe especially when -- she’s teasing him like this, is that she never really knows just how long of a fuse he’s burning.  It could last for days, for hours, or seconds, and when it burns out, his reaction is always immediate, always intense, and always deliberate.  It’s a reminder that he’s always under control because the second he loses his grasp on himself, anything could happen.  He’s like a live grenade, and she’s just pulled the pin.

The box of ammo spills out of his hand, copper-cased bullets bouncing across the floor and scattering onto the mattress, and she’s got one heartbeat of a second to catch his eyes and realize,  _oh_ , right,  _that’s_ why he wasn’t looking at her, because they’re keen and intent and blazing just like the air in this room, which -- well, there had definitely been air here, earlier, but now it feels like it all got sucked away somewhere, or maybe like it’s been lit on fire, which can’t be worse than the heat of before.

And she suddenly gets exactly why he'd decided to deal with the heat the way he had.

The other thing about Michael is that when they get like this, when one or the other of them finally gives in, because it’s never just so easy as  _hey, I really like you, let’s go make out_ , is that in close proximity he makes her feel like a piece of glass shattering on concrete.  She can’t keep track of herself, all limbs and hands and trying to get as close to him as she possibly can, legs wrapping around his, arms going around his neck.  He pushes her back into the pillow with rough kisses, a low, aching groan pulling from deep in his chest, but she’s dragging him right along, feeling his fingers knotting in her hair as his free hand strokes right down her body, leaving a long smudge of oil against her skin.  He smells like sweat and cordite, and the heat of the room feels like it’s all coalesced deep down inside her, in her belly, lower, pounding with her pulse, white-hot and desperate.  He makes her feel like she could crawl right out of her skin with sheer  _want_ , running his mouth over the taut muscle of her neck, palm cupping the swell of her breast, flicking out a moan with his thumb, his tongue, smothering it again with his mouth as her fingers drag down his back hard enough to leave thin white lines that trace themselves in angry red.

She feels like a twig about to snap, is sure that spontaneous combustion is totally a thing that happens to people, and boxers and panties are still  too much clothing, so they scramble out of them, sending a shower of bullets onto the floor when the box gets knocked off in the tussle.  He reaches, awkward, for the nine-mil she’d cleaned earlier, shoves it under the pillow, the metal sliding along her skin, cool, for once, the only cool thing in the room, this room that’s sweltering and stifling, their breathless sounds sticking in the thick air.

And it’s -- it’s his fingers gripping and tracing and doing things to her that prove guns aren’t the only things he’s good at handling.  It’s his taste in her mouth and the smell of his skin when she breathes in, his voice turned rough and ragged and whispering in her ears, sparking dull explosions all along her body.  It’s kisses that bruise her lips and the tang of salt on her tongue when she retraces the path that drop of sweat had taken with its tip.  It’s her pushing him over and running her fingers over his chest while his dig into her hips, and it’s both of them, her back arching, his head thrown back, caught in a tangle of arms and legs, rocking against the mattress, tugging the sheet loose, sinking deep into the pillows.  It’s sweat and salt and the drowning heat of the day turning every touch into the strike of a match against sandpaper.  It’s her fingers fisting in the sheet and twisting into his hair, the way his eyes dilate until the blue is nearly swallowed up by black, the way he drags his name out of her throat and swallows it.  It’s messy, sticky, damp tangled sheets and it's every muscle in his body tensing, standing out in his arms like cords under her fingers when his body shakes and releases.  It’s her shuddering and falling apart and him talking her back down again, his voice soft, his hand gentle against her hair.

It’s dim in the room when she can open her eyes again, body loose and lazy, glazed with sweat, her smile dopey and exhausted, her hair a tangled mess.  He’s on his side, and there it is, that absolute sense of relaxation, that thing she couldn’t define earlier but knows she wants more of for him.  It’s got to be contentment: that’s what’s in his eyes that makes them so much softer, that’s what’s making him smile, that’s why his breath is so slow and even and why he’s let her in enough to be the person allowed to see him like this, to be there when he falls apart and puts himself back together in the best possible way and it is, she's beginning to realize, the most unbelievably addictive thing she knows.

_God_ , she thinks,  _I’m in trouble_.

What she says, though, is: "You should know better than to start taking your clothes off around me."

He smiles, and it's not the shark-white, used-car-salesman smile of the spy; it's the one that crinkles the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that are drawing there despite religious wearing of those amber sunglasses.  It's the one that makes the mortar in the walls she's been building and reinforcing her whole life crack and loosen, it makes something in her chest melt and soften.  It might not light up a room, but it sure lights _her_  up.

Yeah.  Trouble.

But the best kind.


End file.
